Down Home, Upriver
by PleasedAsPunch
Summary: Rose Tyler lives with her rebellious sister, Reinette, and mother on the outskirts of Monroe, Louisiana in 1923. When the circus comes to town, she meets a tall, gangly man who everyone calls the Doctor, a kind, complicated, and mysterious man.
1. Chapter 1

The summer of 1923 in Monroe was hot and damp and sang with a near-constant hum of insects all and sundry. The small children who lived in the poorer part of town ran around buck naked in the summer heat, covered in dirt and grass stains but cool and comfortable as a garden cucumber. Their mamas would look after them from inside the house, arms too far plunged in the washing to do more than holler half-hearted admonishments out the window.

My own mama, Jacqueline Tyler née Delahoussaye, stood on the front porch of our small home, sweeping off leaf debris from the willows that surrounded the house. It needed a fresh coat of paint, had for about fifteen years, and the wood, worn and gray, showed through an ancient veil of white lead. The house used to belong to my daddy, a man called Peter Tyler who hailed from Tennessee before he settled down in Monroe with my mother, but he died before I was old enough to know him. My sister had only been four at the time. She said he was a kind man with a tanned face from picking cotton all day, and I didn't have much choice but to believe her because we didn't have a single photograph of him.

Mama said Reinette looked more like him than I did, but neither of us took after him in particular. To me he was some kind of solid dream just beyond my grasp. We were proof that he lived, but his memory wasted away for lack of a material germ to flourish in my mind. He was a man I loved on principle, the way a girl loves the idea of having a father who loves her in return, but it was a love that lacked substance, was faceless and impersonal as much as it was, still, constant.

I walked along the dirt road outside of town that eventually gave way to the smaller dirt path that came up to our house. I wore a loose-fitting dress and a pair of flat boots I had for work, but despite their soft, old leather, my feet ached from the strain of standing all day, walking two miles into town and then two miles back. The further one walked out of Monroe, the more one was liable to find themselves in dense Louisiana wilderness—nothing like the bayous further south, but a kind of wilderness that all the same begged exploring. As a small girl I had wandered only a safe distance from home so that Mama or sometimes Reinette could better keep an eye on me, but as I grew older I went further and discovered a willow tree so large that its wide, wilting branches left space enough between them and the trunk that I could run and jump freely within it. I didn't take Reinette to my tree when she joined me on adventures, which was just as well because I'm certain she too had her own sanctuary that I knew nothing of, perhaps in the branches of a thick old gum tree or by the spray of cattails next to the little pond just a way off from the house. We were close enough to love each other, Reinette and I, but not enough that there weren't some secrets, always some amount of closely guarded privacy.

When I was fourteen I stopped school and began working, stopping too my adventures into our thick wilderness. Reinette had left for the first time, and Mama's washing work wasn't bringing in enough money. No one wanted a laundress they had to travel two miles for when they could find one just as good in town. So I worked first as a cotton picker like my daddy had, but it was seasonal work and the wages were poor. I came home late in the evenings—we worked as long as the summer sun would allow—covered in sweat and dirt, my skin burned in the way that daddy's, Mama said, had tanned: thoroughly. She would let me eat my supper with one hand as she scraped the dirt and grime from the other, switching when she judged each clean enough. We did this all of late summer and into autumn until the harvest was over. I didn't return the next year. Mama didn't let me go back, but she never said why, and I didn't ask because I hated it.

When spring came I found work at a small dry goods store in town run by a man called Henrik and his wife. They needed another set of hands, and because I could count and read better than most folks, he hired me to work six days a week with good pay. At first his wife always looked at me suspiciously, had not allowed me to be in the same room alone with her husband for more than five minutes. I didn't blame her. I was young, and by the accounts of others, though nothing close to Reinette's effortless beauty, pretty enough that later on I realized Mrs. Ameline Henrik saw me as a real threat to whatever variety of marital bliss she'd built with her husband. She ought to have given him more credit. They were middle-aged and childless but not for lack of trying, and if Ameline remained a little stiff over the years, Mr. Henrik became something as close to a father as I would ever get.

We moved everyday goods like soap, seed, paper, and cloth. Mr. Henrik stocked grain and rice at more expensive prices than the grocer, but they weren't a big moneymaker, and the people who did buy them where willing to pay extra for the convenience of buying their husband's tobacco and their pantry necessities at the same time.

Besides textiles and tobacco, Mr. Henrik's biggest profits came from his 'exotic' tinned foods. No one else in Monroe had the strange delicacies that lined the shelves of Henrik's Dry Goods and Imported Foodstuffs, which were mainly pickled sundries imported from his European trade connections he established during the war. We had everything from herring to capers, gherkins to sauerkraut, even chocolate from Belgium and macarons from Paris in all colors of the rainbow. I had tried them all in turn, each so different from my mother's hearty but plain cooking, each a wonder and a glimpse beyond the parish limits.

It was a day in early spring when I walked back from minding the store, my leather boots scraping along the dusty path up to the house, the sun still lolling lazily in the late afternoon sky. Mama swept the leaves and blossoms from the willows off the porch with an ancient broom, her hands cracked and dry from a day's worth of washing. She spotted me from her perch and smiled in an expectant kind of way.

"Gotta letter from your sister today," she hollered, pulling a white square from the front pocket of her apron. I bounced up the steps to the house and kissed her on the cheek. The letter was unopened.

"Should I read it now, mama?" I asked, bending down to unlace my boots and slide them off. My feet were sore and I was sure there was a blister forming on my toe. It meant I probably needed to get a new pair, which would for a while cause blisters of their own until they were broken in. No, what I needed was a bicycle, that way I could save my feet from the daily four-mile round-trip journey. But we didn't have the money. Not yet, anyway.

Usually Mama would insist on letting me take my time, fix me a glass of tea, and go back to her chores while she waited for me to come and help with supper. But today was letter day, which meant that all patience was gone with the wind.

I smiled and took the letter from her. She sat herself in the rocker by the door and smoothed out her apron in an attempt to maintain her calm. I, too, was anxious to hear from Reinette, for it had been almost three months since we'd last had word.

"'Dear Mama and Rose,

I'm sorry it's been so long since my last letter. I hope this finds you well. I'm still in New Orleans and I'm of half a mind to stay forever. I don't think I've ever been to a place more beautiful and full of people. But I'll be seeing you soon. Louis bought a stake in a traveling circus styled in the old French way, and he says he wants to see his investment. A traveling circus! I thought he was putting me on! What a funny thing to do, but he's convinced it will make him a tidy profit, and when he gets it in his mind to do something it's as good as done.

Anyway, the circus will be in Monroe within the week before it moves on north. Maybe you've seen it in the paper. We'll be arriving behind the circus whenever Louis says we'll go—it's entirely his notion, and all of his friends are at his disposal. Men are strange creatures. I'll write to you when we leave New Orleans. I'm so keen to see you both.

Love as always,

Reinette'"

I folded up the letter and held it in my hands. I hadn't seen my sister in a year and a half, ever since she ran of with her latest beau, a man in his late thirties named Louis Navarre, a dubious but wealthy businessman in New Orleans.

Mama sat quietly in her chair, rocking back and forth, the treads thrumming over the seams of the floorboards. "Will you read it again?" she asked. "I like to hear your voice."

I nodded and began again, my sister's words filtered through my voice. The first time Reinette ran off, she was barely eighteen. She went all the way to St. Louis with a man called Charles Williams who showered her with gifts and what she thought was love. She seemed old to me then, wiser and more superior. She'd taken a job in a small hotel in the middle of Monroe where travelers of all sorts stayed, usually on their way to or from New Orleans or Baton Rouge. That's how she met him. He charmed her and made promises while she poured him drinks.

People, even the smartest of them, even the ones who are practically worshipped by little sisters, can be fooled. But Reinette wasn't one to be fooled twice, and eight months later, after my mother had cried more times than I had seen her cry before, even more than when daddy died, she showed up at the end of our dusty little path, a suitcase we'd never seen before packed to bursting, wearing a knowing look that bore no shame, that was, I believe, a look victorious.

Reinette wanted to see the world, she told us, wanted to see new places and meet people who liked talking. Sick of cleaning and serving in the hotel, tired of being poor and wanting, she wanted to do things, real things. She wanted, she said, to live at the pleasure of the world.

Mama hadn't asked Reinette what she'd done when she'd been gone. Maybe it didn't need asking. By then I was going on sixteen, and I knew what it meant when an unmarried woman ran off with a man. I knew that it was a good thing we lived a spell out of town. If we didn't, we'd have been the objects of some disdain: the family of a woman ruined. But I didn't think of her in that way. She'd made a real choice to go on an adventure. She left Monroe, if only temporarily, and lived. To me she was braver and more beautiful than ever.

After Charles she still ran off from time to time, but never for longer than a month, usually coming back with a great beaming smile and a wonderful story of each new place she saw. If Mama ever thought about telling her off, she never acted on it. I think she knew there was no telling Reinette what to do and that if she tried, there was a chance Reinette wouldn't come back. It wasn't until a year and a half ago when she met Louis, a man she described as smart and handsome and rich, that she left, it seemed, for good. We received the occasional letter, but the more letters we received, the more it became clear she had no immediate plans to return, until now.

After I finished it the second time, I searched Mama's eyes for some kind of reaction, but there didn't seem to be any there. She usually lived for the days we received letters from Reinette. They were so few and far between that the effect of one flushed Mama's cheeks and dominated conversation for weeks.

"It'll be a good thing, won't it, Mama, seein' Reinette? Maybe she'll bring us some of that coffee you like so much."

She sighed and gave me a weak sort of smile, patted my knee and brought her hand up to cup my cheek.

"You're a good girl, honey. Thank you for readin' the letter to me." Mama stood up and brushed off her apron, though there was nothing to brush off. She grabbed the broom and walked back inside, the screen door slapping shut behind her.

I took the letter and read it again to myself, studying Reinette's tight, neat cursive that she spent so long perfecting. I knew that I should have gone inside to help Mama with supper, but all I could think of was the letter. As excited as I was to see my sister again, I was mesmerized by the idea of a circus. The furthest I'd been from home was the eastern-most edge of Ouachita Parish when Reinette and I took a ride in Mr. Henrik's new Little Six. The wind blew in our faces and the dust from the road flew up in furious clouds; we had never gone so fast in our lives. It was the next night that I found a letter on the kitchen table saying she'd gone away with Louis.

I tried to shake the memory of the last time I'd seen my sister and thought instead of wonders that would come to town with the circus. I'd never seen one before, only knew that a circus was supposed to be the greatest show on Earth. Having never seen any show at all, I was inclined to believe what I'd heard. But I knew one thing well enough: the circus meant new people. The circus meant a wondrous new world right inside of Monroe.

The circus, I thought, sweeping my hair back out of my face before going inside—was an opportunity.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes: This chapter mentions (very briefly) suicide and PTSD**

Summer mornings that broke over Monroe were blanketed by a cool haze that promised stifling heat as the day folded into afternoon. I woke up early—earlier than Mama, who rose at full light—to walk to the store. Mornings were so quiet out in our secluded woods, the crickets the only creatures to make a sound, the air so still that the slightest animal movement seemed to echo against the house.

I laced up my boots again after stuffing a piece of cotton wool inside, hopefully to prevent more blistering, ran a comb through my hair, which was blonde and cropped into a reasonably fashionable bob, though there was no taming it straight in the humidity, so I left it to hang in half-hearted waves. I wore, too, a straw cloche that Mama had gotten me for my nineteenth birthday. I had seen it in a store window in town, and she spent at least month's worth of her washing money to buy it.

The walk into town was a lonely one until about the last half mile, where I passed through the poorer section of town. There the buildings were smaller and less packed together, many of them falling apart. Chickens ran free from their coops and stray cats weaseled through dilapidated crawlspaces. After a while the quality of houses changed dramatically. They were made mostly of brick, and the small lawns were well kept, eventually, subtly, giving way to the town proper.

On the west side of town, abutting the river, is the place I imagined they'd put the circus. There were open swathes of land—though the boundaries of town were quickly encroaching—perched on the Ouachita River overlooking West Monroe across it. Indeed, as I rounded a corner, one that between buildings allowed a glimpse upriver, I saw a lone jalopy parked in the grass, a small tent pitched at its rear. The city did a decent job of running vagrants off of public property, so if they'd made it until morning, they were probably allowed to be there.

Mr. Henrik wasn't at the store yet when I arrived, so I unlocked and opened up, took off my hat and keyed open the till before arranging the front end. I busied myself by checking the logbook, restocking the shelves, hoping that Ameline would bring in some daisies to replace the wilting bunch we had in a Mason jar on the front counter. It was around seven-thirty when I heard the bell jingle, signaling, I thought, the arrival of the Henriks, so I made my way to the front.

It was not, however, the Henriks, but a very tall and thin man who I had never seen before in my life. Granted, this wasn't a particularly difficult accomplishment, my having not known very many people, and Monroe being a fairly decent-sized town, but we had enough regulars that it was common for me to recognize faces and know most of their names. Especially at this time in the morning, when the store mostly saw a slow trickle of regulars in for their weekly visit, it was odd to see a man I didn't know from Adam.

I saw him before he saw me, I having been somewhat hidden behind the shelves. He looked around the store as if assessing it, and yet he looked almost confused. He wore brown trousers that had seen better days, a white shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a brown vest. His hair was askew rather than carefully tamed by pomade or oil like most men wore theirs, but with an intentional, devil-may-care look about it.

When I poked out from behind a display of soap—bar, liquid, and flakes—he jumped in surprise.

"Can I help you with anything, sir?" I asked. He stared at me with an odd sort of expression for a brief moment before he made up his mind to collect himself. Tall, thin, and head in the clouds, I thought.

I walked around behind the counter as he rifled through his bag, a khaki satchel stained with mud.

"I—um—yes, sorry. I heard from a reliable source that you sell canvas here," he said, flattening a wrinkled piece of paper on the countertop.

"You heard correctly," I replied. Tall, thin, head in the clouds, and a Yankee, if heard correctly.

"I need to buy about fifteen yards. Do you have that much?"

We did. "Made from Louisiana cotton."

He studied the piece of paper again, squinting his eyes.

"You don't happen to have a basket or anything? I need to get a bunch of other things, too."

I handed him a chipwood basket and he turned on his heel to walk around the store. By that time more customers had come in, and I'd rung up three and cut and tied his canvas before he came back up to the counter.

"Olives," he said.

"Yes?" I asked, turning around to find him with his basket brimming with so many items that they formed a mountain waiting to crumble.

"You have Picholine olives." His face was creased in a kind of unsettled disbelief, the slight wrinkles around his eyes crinkled in confusion, which made him look older than I suspected he was, which might have been his early thirties.

"We do," replied. I looked at his basket where he had, it appeared, put five jars of them.

"I've never seen them in America. I used to eat these all the time, you know, abroad."

I began taking the items carefully out of his basket so that the pile didn't come tumbling down, and entered the prices into the register. He had soap, needle and thread, a bag of beans that I weighed and put aside, strike-anywhere matches, a case of five pencils, and of course the olives.

"Abroad?" I asked before quickly realizing what he meant. I wish I'd shut my mouth.

"The war," he responded, and I just nodded. I'd seen enough men in Monroe back from the war to know that it was a subject best left untouched. Mama had a friend who's boy Jimmy took his own life after months of saying his nightmares were becoming real, like he was out there all over again.

"Where you from?" I asked him, hoping to change the subject. His eyes were shifting over the store as he waited for me to finish ringing him up. "You're not from around here. We get a fair number of out-of-towners, but I think you're the most out of town that we've had in a while."

"I was born and raised in Poughkeepsie."

"Where's that?"

He arched an eyebrow. "Poughkeepsie, New York?"

"I haven't seen much outside of Monroe," I replied, a little irked he thought I should know where that was. "What are you doing all the way down here, anyway?"

Just as I finished putting his items in a brown paper bag, the canvas neatly folded and tied on top, Mr. Henrik entered the store wearing a large toothy grin under his great mustache.

"Rose!" he exclaimed, holding a newspaper up in his hands. "Did you see?"

"MONROE TO HOST CIRCUS!" the front page read in large, black letters.

"Think of the business we'll get!" Mr. Henrik exclaimed with an almost manic look of excitement. "Might even need to get more help around here, Rosie, what do you think?"

"I'm sure we'll be able to manage the store just fine. We've been all right even when it gets busy. That'll be a dollar even," I said, turning abruptly from Mr. Henrik back to my customer, who my employer seemed to take no heed of in light of the recent news.

As the man pulled money from his bag, he looked between Mr. Henrik and me.

"Have you folks ever seen a circus before?" he asked.

"Saw one somewhere in the English countryside before shipping over to France," Mr. Henrik replied. "Meant to calm the nerves of the men, I expect. Worked a bit too well. Half the company came down with the clap." He chuckled at the memory, which I didn't think was one appropriate for present company, or any company.

I shot him a look. "I've never seen one before," I said hurriedly, "but I heard they're supposed to be magnificent."

"They're fantastic!" the man said, a great, toothy smile spreading across his face.

"Have you been to one?" I asked. "Up in Poughkeepsie, I mean?"

"Not in Poughkeepsie, no. One a bit closer to here, actually."

"Oh?" Mr. Henrik asked with a raised eyebrow. "Do you mean the one that passed through Mobile a year or so back?"

"Even closer." There was a glint of mischief in his eyes that made the corners of my mouth twitch up before I could help it. The man nodded in the direction of the newspaper that Mr. Henrik now held under his arm.

"The circus coming to Monroe?" My lips curved into a full smile. "But how could you have seen it? I thought it hadn't made its debut yet."

"Oh, I haven't actually seen it, I suppose. Not in the audience. I'm John Dixon," he said, holding out his hand to me over the countertop. We looked at each other square in the eye, and as I took his proffered hand, it was for a moment like he and I were the only people in the room, but the sensation passed before I had much time for me to register the reason why, if there'd even been one. "I work for the circus coming up from New Orleans."

"Are you really?" Mr. Henrik said before I could introduce myself in return. He took Mr. Dixon's hand for himself, though it had not been offered. "What did I tell you, Rose? Already bringing in business! Didn't see any signs of the circus on my way here. Where're y'all setting up?"

"Just by the river," Mr. Dixon replied, clearly made more than a little uncomfortable by Mr. Henrik's retail prospects.

"That's your car!" I said, remembering the jalopy and tent set up in the grass.

He reddened slightly. "That'd be mine. The rest of the crew and wagons will get here tomorrow, I expect."

Mr. Henrik looked at his watch, and his eyes widened. "Look at the time! All this talk of circuses made me forget I've got to be off to a meeting with a potential supplier. Rose, you can handle the store alone? Ameline won't be in until after lunch, I'm afraid, but she's bringing you some food, too."

I nodded. I'd run the store alone several times before without a problem. It was then with a smile that Mr. Henrik shook Mr. Dixon's hand again, and told him to stop by the store for whatever he needed, that anyone from the circus was welcome in his shop. Mr. Dixon thanked him politely as the burly man made his way back out to his Little Six.

Mr. Dixon grabbed the brown bag off the countertop, and also made for the door, but he hadn't walked two steps before wheeling around. "I didn't get your name before…"

"Rose," I said quickly. "Rose Tyler."

"Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Rose Tyler." His tongue and teeth seemed to take particular delight in forming the syllables. "And that man, too. I didn't get his name. Is he your father?"

"Oh, no! That's Mr. Henrik. This is his store. He's just my employer."

He nodded in return. "If you'd like…" he started, but trailed off.

"Yes?"

"Well, you said you've never seen a circus before. This one will take a few days to set up, but you're welcome to stop in anytime. I can give you a tour."

Before I could stop myself, before I could consider things like work and Mama and Mr. Henrik, I said yes. "I would love to."

He smiled again: a friendly smirk. "Good, then," he returned, turning once more towards the door.

"Oh, Mr. Dixon?" I called after him.

"Yes?"

"Don't eat too many of those olives at one time. They'll make you sick." I turned around then myself, wearing my own smirk, my head full of lions, tigers, acrobats, and a man who called himself John Dixon.

April 1917

It was the only time I had seen Mama try to make sense of the newspaper. Years after, it remained a surreal memory: I, at thirteen years old, walking in the door covered in sweat and dirt, looking over at the large tin basin sitting by the table in the kitchen, which drained of its usual contents of grayish, soap suds and soggy clothing was instead filled with steaming clear water. Mama hadn't been waiting expectantly as she usually did on bath days, but was hunched over the table with her eyes squinted in concentration.

Reinette then burst in the door behind me, the spring-rigged screen door slapping loudly in the silence of the afternoon.

"Mama," she gasped, her breath labored from running in from town. "I saw a man's newspaper at the hotel–"

"What's going on?" I asked. I had started unbuttoning my dress, but I stopped midway down the front and looked up between Mama and Reinette. Reinette's eyes were wide with distress, and I thought surely something had gone horribly wrong in town. Mama simply looked confused. She had always had problems with reading and letters, having never learned properly, and she struggled to read much more than her own name.

"Mrs. Moore left this when she came for her laundry," Mama said, gesturing to the paper on the table.

"War, Mama," Reinette said before I could get close enough to see. "He says Congress declared war."

I had looked at the headline on the paper, the large, black letters jumping off the page and settling into a lump in my throat.

"U.S. OFFICIALLY AT WAR."

"War?" I said, like I'd never heard the word before. Mama was silent for a moment and then sighed. When she looked up from the newspaper it was as if she saw through me, but perhaps it was just over me, to Reinette.

"Sweetie," she said with a strange evenness to her voice, "will you put this in the trash on your way back to work?"

Reinette stood still and resolute, saying nothing, a silent exchange passing between them that I didn't understand. Her eyes were dark with rage and—was it fear? I didn't know. Mama looked resigned and tired, suddenly a shadow within the afternoon light.

"Rose, honey, get in the tub. It's nothing to waste hot water over," Mama said to me, and I jumped very slightly with the sensation that, even though I was standing in the middle of the room, I had somehow been caught eavesdropping on a deeply personal conversation.

"But Mama," Reinette said, now clutching the newspaper in her hand.

"Not now."

"Then when?!" Reinette yelled, throwing the paper into the air, which caused each sheets to unfurl and buffet down to the floor where large splotches of spilled bathwater bloomed through the text. She turned on her heel and walked out the door, the screen door slapping twice in her wake.

I stood in confusion as I watched my sister leave the house. Later that night I heard her come in to our bedroom and slip in to our shared bed. I had been half eager to ask her the million questions I had, but I didn't know where to start. I didn't know what questions to ask. I was thirteen and small and she was seventeen and to me a woman who knew far more about life than I. Between my desire to know what passed between my mother and sister, I was left to negotiate what seemed to me the task of interrogating God.

So instead I hovered between wakefulness and sleep, feared the War, knowing that it was indeed a War with a capital "w". But what was war to a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in the woods of northern Louisiana? What was a Kaiser? And what about war made my mother become so slight and Reinette so fierce? But still I couldn't fathom the knowledge I didn't know was etched into my bones as if from birth, for there was war whose shadow wouldn't manifest before my eyes until years later when I met men it broke, and there was war that didn't need knowing—that lived inside of me—to raise the dead.


End file.
